SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026
Mike Flanagan walked onto the Blumhouse panel at New York Comic Con on Friday with a promise and a warning. The promise: the first full trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs, his radical reboot of the most cursed franchise in horror. The warning: it's the scariest thing he's ever made — and the man behind The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass says the shoot genuinely scared him.
We covered the first teaser back on October 7 — 40 seconds of dread and a March 12, 2027 release date. Friday's full trailer is the real thing: plot, characters, and Flanagan laying out exactly what kind of Exorcist movie this is going to be.
The setup: a detective, a dead killer, and an altar boy's blood
Scarlett Johansson stars as NYPD homicide detective Julie Miller. Per the official synopsis, via USA Today: "Thirteen years ago, New York City detective Julie Miller (Johansson) ended the terror reign of satanic serial killer Father Sunday. The case made her a hero, and she has thrown herself into her work ever since. Now a new killer scrawls her name in an altar boy's blood on the walls of a church crypt, dragging her back into the darkness she believed she had buried with him."
Father Sunday is played by Jon Leguizamo. The trailer, per multiple reports from the panel, plays like a serial-killer procedural that keeps curdling into something supernatural — gruesome church murders, claims of possession, and a detective forced to ask whether the killers who said Satan made them do it might have had a point.
"The scariest movie I've ever made"
Flanagan did not do the modest-auteur thing at the panel. Asked whether he'd accomplished his goal of making the scariest film of his career, his answer was immediate, per Dread Central: "Yes."
"This movie is so goddamn scary, I swear to God," Flanagan continued. "And I could feel it on set. It was freaking me out in the chair, like off the monitor." When asked whether there was a particular take that convinced him he'd delivered, he said: "There were about a hundred of them. Every time we thought the scary part was over and we were safe for the day, we were very, very wrong."
He'd been building to this in the press, too. Sitting down with Entertainment Weekly before the panel, Flanagan said the writing alone unnerved him: "There were times I'd be typing words and going, 'Whew! Haven't gone here before.'" And on what makes this one different from his usual work: "What makes this scary is a cruelty and a viciousness to the story that's unavoidable based on the story we're telling, but it's not where I typically go. It made me wildly uncomfortable, which I think it should. It's like that discomfort means you're doing it right."
His eight-time collaborator Samantha Sloyan, who has a small role in the film, backed him up to EW: "He brings you in and then he scares the crap out of you. It's one of the most beautiful things I've seen him shoot, just visually. It's gorgeous."
A completely different direction
The bigger news for franchise nerds: this is not the Exorcist movie you think it is. "This movie is unlike any other 'Exorcist' movie that's ever been made," Flanagan said at the panel, per USA Today — "something that we were really determined to do from the very beginning, to take this franchise in a completely different direction." The mandate the team agreed on, he added: "It had to be scary. It had to just be goddamn scary, like to your bones scary."
The tonal reference point is a surprise: 1990's The Exorcist III, the George C. Scott cult favorite about detective William Kinderman investigating murders linked to a dead serial killer. Flanagan singled it out at the panel as "one of the most underrated, underappreciated films in the franchise," as Dread Central wrote — and the trailer has already sent fans into overdrive, because Johansson's character wears a badge reading "Kinderman" in one shot. Flanagan wouldn't confirm a connection at NYCC. He didn't have to; the speculation is doing the marketing for him.
The cast, the panel, and the franchise math
Alongside Johansson and Leguizamo, the film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Laurence Fishburne, Sasha Calle, Jacobi Jupe and Diane Lane. Friday's panel featured Flanagan and Ejiofor with executive producers James Wan and Jason Blum — about as much horror firepower as you can fit on one NYCC stage.
The stakes for Universal are real. The studio bought the rights to a new Exorcist trilogy for a reported $400 million in 2021, then watched David Gordon Green's The Exorcist: Believer (2023) flame out with critics and audiences. Flanagan's film is pointedly not a sequel to Believer — it's a hard reset, and the Mindhunter-meets-Exorcist III pitch is the studio betting that the way back is through the franchise's most respected deep cut rather than its most famous one.
Flanagan's ridiculous month
Worth noting how absurd Flanagan's October is. His eight-part Carrie — the Stephen King remake for Prime Video — premiered just this week (we've got the full binge breakdown here). Clayface, the DC body-horror movie he co-wrote, hits theaters October 23. And now he's out here telling Comic Con crowds that his Exorcist movie scared him. The man is running horror like it's a relay race and he's every leg.
The Exorcist: Martyrs opens in theaters March 12, 2027. The trailer is out now. Sleep tight.
The Exorcist: Martyrs — directed by Mike Flanagan, from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster. A Mindhunter-style serial-killer procedural inside the Exorcist canon, heavily inspired by The Exorcist III (1990); not a sequel to 2023's The Exorcist: Believer.
